Escambia County spends an estimated $46.5 million annually to hold inmates in an overcrowded jail.

There is consensus among county commissioners that some form of jail reform is in needed, and in August, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report offering the county 14 ways to fix overcrowding.

Commissioners said Thursday they are open to considering safe and responsible alternatives to putting low-risk individuals behind bars, but acknowledged there is only so much they can do on their own.

Any major criminal justice reforms in the area will likely take buy-in from four other stakeholders: the judiciary, the state attorney, the public defender and law enforcement.

Here's what each group had to say about the ACLU recommendations and their own role in criminal justice reform.

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More than 50,000 people currently inhabit jails in Florida’s 67 counties.(Photo: Tony Giberson/tgiberson@pnj.com)

The Public Defender

Public Defender Bruce Miller was straightforward in his assessment of solving jail overcrowding.

"The solution is not complicated," Miller said. "The solution is very simple. It just seems the players lack the political will to accomplish what needs to be done, which is stop with monetary bond on non-violent misdemeanors."

Miller noted that despite the county's public struggles with space and funding for inmates, the jail population has not gone down. He said the system was clogged with people accused of offenses like petty theft, driving with suspended licenses, panhandling and writing worthless checks.

He said most of the people sitting in jail for those crimes were there simply because they couldn't afford to bond themselves out.

"There are two separate and distinct criminal justice systems," Miller said. "One for the indigent, and one for the wealthy."

The ACLU estimated in its report that there were 60 people in jail being held on bonds of less than $1,000, which, according to county officials, means they'd have to put up $200 to go free.

Miller said people tended to frame the need for monetary bond as a public safety issue, which he called a red herring.

He noted that if "person A" and "person B" had similar backgrounds and committed similar crimes, and one person could afford a $1,000 bond and the other couldn't, keeping just one of them in jail "did nothing to improve the safety of the community."

He added the ability to incarcerate the poor gives leverage to prosecutors, because people who risked losing their jobs and homes while sitting in jail are more likely to accept a plea deal.

Miller said serious crimes like homicide were a different ballgame, but jailing low-level offenders who don't pose a risk to society benefited politicians and not the public.

"Being tough on crime put a lot of people in Tallahassee (government) and kept them there. It is a popular pitch to make, but it costs," he said. "It costs a lot of money."

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Escambia County Corrections transport vans leave the jail en route to the M.C. Blanchard Judicial building on Thursday April 20, 2017.(Photo: Tony Giberson/tgiberson@pnj.com)

The State Attorney

State Attorney Bill Eddins disagrees with many of the findings in the ACLU report.

"My primary goal is the protection of the public," said State Attorney Bill Eddins. "I feel the system we have in place is a good, conservative system that works. The system advocated by the ACLU — in some instances — is a very liberal system that will not protect the public from people who commit crimes."

Eddins added he is open to discussion about changes that could improve the system, but, as he saw it, the current system is working well and as intended.

Still, he said, the ACLU report had spurred some action within his office.

Eddins said it has always been his policy to screen for defendants who could be eligible for alternative sentencing or probation and expedite plea offers in those cases. After reviewing the ACLU report, Eddins said he has re-emphasized the policy to supervisors and staff.

Eddins said he was in favor of expanding the use of GPS monitoring — something the county has already done through use of a $50,000 grant. Eddins also said he took no issue with the ACLU's suggestion the county expand its use of pretrial release services — though he said he believed the county already has a robust system in place.

The state attorney said his office has begun holding weekly reviews of cases where individuals were held on less than $1,000 bonds. Eddins said where appropriate, the reviews can and have led to lowered bonds.

"Our policy is to keep people in jail when they deserve to be there, and get them out when they don't deserve to be there," Eddins said.

Still, he said, judges aren't just "plucking numbers out of thin air" when they set a defendant's bond.

He said there are factors that go into play such as state statutes, the defendant's criminal history, whether they had other pending criminal cases, the danger to victims and the defendant's ability to pay. He added the nation's criminal justice system gives every defendant the right to free legal representation, so they have an attorney advocating for their interest and working for reduced bonds where appropriate.

A sticking point for Eddins is an ACLU recommendation calling for an assessment tool to help judges predict a defendant's likelihood to re-offend or abscond if released. The assessment tool the ACLU highlighted is in use in four states, which Eddins believes represents a fairly limited adoption rate.

Eddins said, "My position is we have very experienced and very competent judges" and he was hesitant to "delegate judicial power to unelected people when our judges are making good decisions and our system is working."

The judiciary and the county

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Tamyra Jarvis, director of corrections of the Escambia County Jail, poses for a photo outside the department's building on April 13, 2017, in Pensacola.(Photo: Tony Giberson/tgiberson@pnj.com)

Judges are frequently at the heart of debates about criminal justice reform, but they aren't always in a position to speak out on the topic themselves for fear of undermining the justice system they are tasked to uphold.

The local judiciary wrote in a statement, "At this time, the First Judicial Circuit does not believe it to be appropriate to comment publicly with regard to the ACLU recommendations. However, as always, we remain committed to working with our community partners to ensure an efficient and fair system of justice."

Though the judicial system as a whole did not take a public stance, local stakeholders said in a county commission meeting Thursday morning that individual judges had indicated they had a willingness and appetite to streamline the system.

In the meeting, Benjamin Stevenson, a staff attorney for the ACLU, told commissioners some judges he'd met with would be willing to divert more defendants into pretrial release where appropriate, but said there were concerns the program was already overloaded. Tamyra Jarvis, director of corrections, told commissioners the department was currently managing nearly 4,600 cases.

Commissioner Grover Robinson said if the judiciary had specific concerns with the pretrial release program, the county was more than willing to seek solutions. He added that everyone involved in local criminal justice had defined roles and priorities, so his hope was they could all agree on some goals and a path to work toward them.

"I'm not looking to tell anyone how to do their job, but I do want to ask if they can be part of the team," Robinson said.

The commission also stressed there needs to be buy-in from the public and the media and an expectation that if 20 people were released through a new diversion initiative, there could be one or two who re-offended.

Commissioner Jeff Bergosh said the typical response was to "beat up" the judge who decided to release the offender, but he said there needed to be an understanding one bad apple was not an indictment of a whole system.

Law enforcement

Officer Mike Wood, a spokesman for the Pensacola Police Department, said the PPD's role was to enforce the laws that were on the books, not dictate policy. He did, however, note the department had historically embraced alternatives to arrest when they were an option, citing the PPD's high utilization of juvenile civil citations as an example.

Chief Deputy Eric Haines of the Escambia County Sheriff's Office, said the agency had made conscious efforts to avoid unnecessary arrests.

The ACLU recommended that law enforcement officers responding to non-violent, low-level crimes issue offenders a notice to appear in court rather than take them into custody.

Haines said the Sheriff's Office has more than quadrupled its use of these criminal citations from 2008 — when deputies issued 381 — to 2016, when 1,669 citations were issued. The agency is already on pace to top that number for 2017, with some 1,529 citations issued through Sept.12.

“We're trying to strike the balance between reasonableness and safety.”

Eric Haines, ECSO chief deputy

Still, people need to "recognize law enforcement needs discretion to take people to jail sometimes," Haines said.

For example, he said it would be ill-advised for a deputy to go to the scene of a fight, hand an offender a citation and walk away, because the confrontation would just flare up again. Sometimes, he said, arrests are made as a public safety precaution because a suspect had a serious or lengthy history of arrests, or was a continued threat to the victim.

Haines added a judge always has the discretion to release a defendant at their first appearance, but typically judges find deputies are justified in their decisions to arrest.

He said Sheriff's Office officials went back and reviewed cases where individuals were being held on less than $1,000 bond. In many cases they had other pending criminal charges. In other cases, family members said they refused to pay the bond because the defendants were a threat to themselves or their family, or had a substance dependency and jail was "the safest place for them."

"We're trying to strike the balance between reasonableness and safety," Haines said.

The ACLU

In its report, the ACLU wrote, "Escambia County needs a criminal justice system that is cost effective, operates fairly and keeps us safe. However, our jail is crowded, expensive and houses many non-violent, pretrial defendants who could safely reside in the community with their family and continue to work while awaiting court."

Benjamin Stevenson, an ACLU attorney, said criminal justice and bail reform efforts aren't about giving anyone a free pass for bad behavior, but rather about making sure the system was fair, equitable and efficient.

"We need to ask ourselves, what are we trying to achieve by putting people in jail?" Stevenson said. "Undoubtedly, the main goals are public safety and ensuring the rule of law."

He said he believed it was incumbent upon stakeholders to look at every jail detainee and ask, "how are we better off by putting this guy in jail?"

If the individual is a habitual offender, a danger to the community or a legitimate risk to flee justice, "then, OK, I get it," Stevenson said.

But how does anyone benefit from spending $2,000 a month to jail someone who wrote a bad check or drove with a suspended license, he asked rhetorically.

“Sitting in jail for months on end sure sounds like punishment to me.”

Benjamin Stevenson, ACLU attorney

"Bail reform would help alleviate two considerable costs," Stevenson said. "First, we wouldn't have to dedicate so many public resources to locking up members of the community. Second, we wouldn't have to suffer the consequences of people losing their job, stable housing and positive social connections (while incarcerated)."

He added about 65 percent of the jail's population had not actually been convicted of anything.

"If the presumption of innocence is to mean anything, a person should not be punished before they are convicted," Stevenson said. "Sitting in jail for months on end sure sounds like punishment to me."